Vice-Presidential Debates

A letter in response to Ryan Lizza’s article (August 6, 2012)

It’s too bad that the young Paul Ryan was not around to enjoy the days of truly small government. In 1929, my father, an engineer, lost his job when his company abruptly cancelled plans for an oil refinery he had been helping to design. He received no severance pay, and there was no opportunity for formal job retraining, no unemployment insurance, and no welfare. He was simply told to pack up his slide rule and go home. My father took any work he could find to help us survive—from fighting wildfires to digging ditches. Our food came from my grandparents’ vegetable garden and chicken house. There was no Social Security or Medicare for them. One good thing: in those days, you could not lose your medical benefits if you lost your job, but only because there weren’t any to begin with. Health care was simple: if you could afford it, you got it; if not, you were forced to skip it—with sometimes fatal results. Ryan mentions that he has three small children. Has he asked his grandparents if they feared losing their children to measles, whooping cough, or polio? Does he think that the government should be involved in research at institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention? If Ryan had been a small-business owner—like the ones he likes to talk about—in the days before there was any kind of social safety net, he might have found that if his customers could not pay their bills neither could he. His bank would not have been able to extend a loan, because it had closed, and his savings in it were gone. We can do with a lot less government, but only if we are willing to go backward.

Bernice L. Youtz

Tacoma, Wash.

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